She led him through the reception area of the studio as if she owned the place and greeted everyone with the studied geniality of a company president who’d made a point of being on a first-name basis with the underlings. “I’ll show you around the soundstages,” she said. “Most of them are down here on the first floor. We’ve still got half an hour to kill.” But as they neared the elevators, she started chatting with a tall man with a gaunt, Abraham Lincoln face; when he made a move toward the elevator door, she discreetly indicated to Desmond that he should get on. “We’re going up to five,” she told the man. Once the doors had closed, she started slathering on praise for a proposal of his she’d read two weeks ago and then introduced him to Desmond as Keith Sommerstone, esteemed creator of, among other films, Insects, one of public television’s most successful documentary series. He got out at the third floor and Jane immediately pushed the button for the lobby. “He’s got a vacuum cleaner on the funds around here,” she said as they descended. “He could propose an eight-part series on whittling and get a green light.”

Desmond was convinced he had something to learn from Jane’s self-confidence, even though he didn’t entirely believe the self-confidence itself—any more, it was obvious, than she did. He suspected she was the kind of person who left everything undone until the last second, and then faked and fibbed her way out of the corner into which she’d painted herself. But the important point was, she did get out. And with her help, he’d get out of his corner as well. She had ambition and wasn’t afraid of it; that was the difference between them. He’d always thought of ambition as a first cousin of greed and envy and, although not closely related, at least on the same family tree as murder. Getting where you wanted necessarily seemed to involve machinations whose sole purpose was to get your rivals to drop their guards so you could charge ahead of them and then slam the gate shut. And if the rivals didn’t get out of the way, you just resorted to plan B and mowed them down. But Jane’s ambition was tempered by a benign lack of clarity: it was apparent she wanted this series to go over, even if she herself wasn’t certain of her motives. The idea of making up an essential “truth” as the center of someone’s life was appalling, but she’d delivered the suggestion with such sweet sincerity, he felt grateful to her for trying to help him out. Since arriving at the station, he’d noticed a definite increase in his pulse rate, an indication of just how desperately he wanted this series to fly.